I’ve already heard too much that StumbleUpon is against Google Adsense TOS in some way, but i wasn’t sure until I found that a friend of mine really suffer from Stumble traffic and his account could get a kick off because of StumbleUpon.
The story begun 1 month ago when I’ve launched a new website in my websites network, The website is a Flash Games Portal. Everything was allright with Google, and I was getting in average a CPC of 15 cents although the website still has a little traffic. 1 week ago someone bookmarked one of my website games on StumbleUpon, I’ve received 3264 visits from StumbleUpon, I know you can consider it as a good thing, in fact it wasn’t. I’ve received 309 clicks from this traffic and got 2.05$ from it ! which means i got less than 1 cent ( 0.01$ ) per click, to be exact it was 0.0066$ per click ! Could you believe this ?
This happened with many publishers not only me. Google Adsense may consider those clicks as invalid ones or maybe they consider Stumbleupon traffic as a cheap one.
You probably want to know why this happened, well maybe because StumbleUpon - and other Bookmarking Portals as Digg, Simpy, Furl… whatever not only Stumble - sometimes drives the traffic to your website under an iFrame, this technique is considered by Google Adsense as Auto-Surf Traffic and this is against Google Adsense TOS. Thats why, you’ll probably get a VERY LOW CPC !
So, why i still using Socialbookmarking services ? Because it help us to share information, meet new people and get new stuff everyday.
Well, what about you ? What do you think ?
June 6th, 2008 at 4:56 pm
You can use a javascript to break out of an iframe.